Monday, October 31, 2016

Ancient enemies: man-killers of prehistory

Happy Halloween, readers! The human psyche is full of fear.
A lot of fear comes from our vivid imaginations-horror is full of hypothetical
situations based on pure fantasy, but on premises that date to real situations
and concepts. Murder, disaster, accident, disease-people die from horrific
causes. Most monsters are humanoid-people are the leading cause of human
deaths. Many of our fears come from animals. Bats are alien-looking, rats carry
disease, and arthropods are alien-looking and often dangerous.

Then there’s the fears dating from actual experiences.
History is replete with examples of people by accident or malice coming into
conflict with animals.People have been
killed by our own domesticated animals: dogs can be taught to be brutal
attackers, and angry cattle, horses, and pigs are more than a match for an
unarmed human.

Then there’s people being killed by wild animals; every day
an unlucky person runs into a dangerous animal, are perceived as predator or
prey, and dispatched by deadly natural weapons honed by generations of natural
selection.Without technology, a human
being is pathetic. We’re bigger than most animals, but the largest predators
dwarf us. Our resistance against venom and chemical weapons is just our size
alone. Our natural weapons are pathetic: we can barely outrun an elephant on a
good day, our strength is feeble, our teeth are small, and our fingers and toes
are tipped with sensitive pads instead of hooves or claws. We have no armor or
horns or quills, we can’t fly, and are only efficient swimmers with a great
deal of effort.

Now imagine humans without our technology.No guns, not even a spear. We were prey.An enemy could come at any direction, and
kill us without a fight. At night, we were blind without fire, at the mercy of
nocturnal predators. You could wake up at any morning and you could find a
member of your family vanished. In the day, you’d be looking at the grass
nervously. Every time you tried to eat or drink you would have to keep your
eyes moving and eating as quickly as possible. If you scavenged from a kill,
you could easily find yourself the neighboring carcass.These are the animals we feared. Welcome to
my nightmare, my friends; I think you’re going to like it.

One of the greatest hominin fossils ever found was of
Australopithecus africanus, found in Taung, South Africa. In 1924 Raymond Dart
found what he first thought was a monkey skull (he was the only scientist of
his time to think it could be a human ancestor, as the racist paradigm of the
day refused to consider an African ancestry). Further finds proved, however,
that it was a 3-year-old child of a plains ape, one confirmed by Leakey and
Johannson to be an upright walking ape that was the closest to our own
species., possibly even a direct ancestor.The child was an amazing find as the skull was attached to a fossilized
brain, a proportionally large brain (leading to the mistaken assumption that Australopithecus
had a larger brain than other apes, but that turned out to be debunked later).
The face was scratched and scarred, and many assumed it was a leopard that
killed the baby (a reasonable assumption)

It was in 2006 that Dr.s Lee Berger and Ron Clarke, experts
in South African paleontology, realized who killed the child. The specimen was
amongst the remains of other small animals, all partially dissembled. The marks
on the face were compared to modern primates killed by predators, and the best
fit was the Crowned Eagle.

The Crowned Eagle is among the largest African raptors, with
the females having known to have 6 foot wingspans and weight 10 lbs, armed with
3 inch (or even larger) talons on muscular feet. They drop from the trees on
nearby prey, crushing them in their talons as they pin the prey to the ground.
They hunt prey as large as 70 lb bushbuck, breaking their backs and skulls with
their talons.Verreaux’s eagle is
larger, but is a hyrax specialist. The Martial Eagle is the largest raptor of
Africa, hunting much of the same prey, and cannot be excluded as a possible
culprit.Both eagles have been hunted
by the peoples of Africa for killing goats, sheep, and even their
children.No doubt the plains apes of
Africa, humans and our ancestors and kin, were on their menu. Even adults would
be vulnerable to attack by these deadly raptors.

Leaving Africa meant leaving these eagles, but their
equivalent is the Golden Eagle, an incredibly successful raptor that
specializes in killing mammals. The females of this iconic predator can grow up
to 15 lbs with 7 foot wingspans. While pheasants, rabbits, and ground squirrels
make up the bulk of their diet, they can bring down 40 lb fawns and sheep.
While not as dangerous as the African eagles, human children today are still
warned to be wary of these birds. They can exert 600 lbs per square inch on
their claws, enough to crush vertebra like celery, and Central Asians raise
them to hunt the wolves that prey on their herds.

In South America, modern humans encountered the legendary
harpy eagle, and in the Philippines the rare superpredator Monkey-Eating eagle.
However, it is in New Zealand that we’ve met our most deadly avian predator.
When the first Maori arrived on the islands, they found the giant moa birds to
be excellent prey, and hunted them to extinction. However, they also
encountered the moa’s previous predator: Harpagornis. Weighing over 30 lbs, it
was a moa specialist. The Maori forever remembered it as the Te Hokioi, or Te
Poukai, father of all birds, a man eating monster of the mountains. It’s
possible that this giant predator inspired the legendary monster Kurangaituku,
a bird woman slain by the heroic Hatupatu.Moas weighed more than 500 lbs, but the fossils show that this giant
eagle could slay them. If a human was caught unaware or unarmed, they would be
easy prey. It’s easy to believe that the Maari deliberately hunted them to
extinction to keep their families safe as well as in competition for moa.

Of course, crowned and martial eagles eat monkeys. So do
other arboreal predators like pythons.Millions of humans are horrified of snakes, and for very good reason.
The rock python is the largest snake in Africa, over 10 feet long and 100 lbs,
but specimens have been recorded being twice as large. Like crowned eagles,
they hunt small antelope and have been recorded attempting to kill children.
Just like the eagles, they eat monkeys in the forests and plains of Africa, and
could have done so with the young and small ancestors of our species.Snakes are masters of stealth, waiting for
days for food to walk into their path.Pythons certainly ate our ancestors, and perhaps even Australopithecus
could have fallen prey to them.

This fear of snakes is reinforced by much deadlier snakes
armed with venom. They strike people in self defense, usually putting up a
threat display before striking. Unlike pythons, however, their bites are lethal
and the snakes would rather follow their bluff with a deadly sting than
flight.Africa is full of venomous
snakes, the most famous being the black mama. Fortunately, it’s reclusive and
more prone to flight than to use its venom. Unfortunately, when it does bite,
it injects 100 mg of neurotoxins and cardiotoxins into the target. The symptoms
are swift-headache, pain, numbness and tingling from the nerves being attacked,
then sweating and mouth-watering as the body’s system struggles. Finally, in
less than 45 minutes in an adult human, the body goes into shock as the venom
hits the heart and spine, causing paralysis and usually death in a matter of
hours.

The puff adder is far more dangerous, ironically. It’s found
in all parts of Africa outside the deserts and jungles, ventures into urban
areas, and usually follows its bluff with attack. The strike is the last line
of defense after camouflage and a menacing hiss, but its deadly and aggressive.
In captivity they are antagonistic and angry, always puffing and striking when
approached.Its bite contains 300 mg of
cytotoxin, a horrifying poison.It sets
in with a decline in blood pressure, bruising, vomiting, blistering, and pain,
then turns to necrosis, killing off the cells in the body. If left untreated,
the necrosis spreads, killing off limbs, inducing gangrene, and the victim dies
of blood loss. 100 mg of the toxin can kill an adult man in 25 hours.

Of course, the most famous of venomous snakes are the
cobras, and the first humans shared their world with three species of spitting
cobra, the forest cobra, and the Egyptian cobra. Spitting is not lethal, but it
does blind the victim, and the bites of spitting cobras contain both cytotoxins
and neurotoxins. The forest and Egyptian cobras are large animals, 7 to 10 feet
long, so their venom is powerful to take on larger prey. Like their spitting
kin, their venom attacks both cells and nerves, leading in paralysis, necrosis,
and death in hours if left untreated. The unwary or curious hominin that
accidentally antagonized these snakes paid with their lives, as such people in
rural East Africa do today.As humans
moved into Asia, they would not only meet more horrific vipers and cobras but
Krait and Taipan. In India alone, gigantic King Cobras, cosmopolitan Spectacled
Cobras, fierce Sawscale and Russel’s vipers, and the tenacious nocturne the
Common Krait. While endangered now, they’re still formidable animals and must
be given a wide berth

The deadliest of all reptiles, however, are the crocodiles.
Every animal has to drink, and the water is the home of these powerful
archosaurs.Three species, only one of
which is still extant, ruled African rivers. The oldest was Rimasuchus or
Lloyd’s Rift Crocodile, appearing in the Miocene and surviving into the early
Pleistocene. 7 meters long, their bites are distinguished by their sheer size
of the marks on mammal bones. In addition to young rhinoceri, ungulates, and
infant proboscideans, primates were fair prey, and their teeth have left many a
mark on human bones from Australopithecus to even Homo erectus.

Rimasuchus was
overthrown in the Pliocene by two species of the genus Crocodylus. The largest
was the horned, 25-foot monster Crocodylus anthropophagus, named for being
found in Olduvai Gorge, where many hominin and human fossils have been found.
No doubt it would have found us easy prey, striking from the water and killing
the victim before anyone knew what was happening, before any alarms could be
sounded. Thankfully, the ice ages dried up the Rift Valley, ending both the old
Rift Crocodile and its horned usurper.

However, Australopithecus would have also been preyed on not
only by the giants above, but by a predator that still haunts African
waterways.Nile Crocodiles are
everywhere,eating anything they can
catch. They range from the common 10 to the rare but documented 20 feet (such
as the legendary 1-ton septuagenarian man-eater Gustave) in length, eating prey
from small fish and turtles to giraffes, buffalo, and eland. There’s even one
incident where foolhardy black rhinoceros tried to swim through deep water and
fell prey to a huge crocodile. If a lion, even a large male, is foolish enough
to probe croc-infested waters, he will die.The still-more-horrifying water pollution and the leather industry have
taken their toll on the crocs, but in protected areas they thrive.The wide range of Nile crocs leads to 12
reported deaths a year even in the 21st century.

Death by crocodile is swift. The moment a prey wades or even
walks to the water’s edge, they are in striking distance. The crocodile strikes
at 20 miles an hour from total submersion, its powerful tail launching it at
the target. Once the opened mouth hits the target, it clamps down 60 2-inch
teeth at 5000 PSI, enough to break a cow’s limb.If the croc hits the muzzle, it will pull the
victim into the water to drown (a human skull would just pop, though). If it
bites a limb, it will pull it in to the water then roll its entire body to
twist the limb off. Usually death from blood loss and drowning finish the prey
off.Baboons and apes in Africa often
refuse to cross water, and it’s unknown when our species learned to overcome
that fear. Even a man with a high-powered rifle is in danger if he gets too
close or is shooting from a boat-the armor and strong skull can withstand
bullets in certain circumstances.

What else do apes and monkeys fear? They fear the night. Why
do we fear the night, the darkness? For one thing, our color vision prevents us
from having effective night vision, rendering us nearly blind. And that’s when
we’re prey for leopards. Take your house cat-they can see at night, have
incredible agility and senses of smell, and can land a nasty scratch or bite if
irritated.

Leopards are not cute little kittens for long. Male leopards can reach 200 lbs and run at 35
miles per hour. Adult male baboons and apes are more than a match for them in
the day, but when night falls, they are targets. Leopards have excellent night
vision, and incredible muscular control and precision. They quietly stalk the
prey, get as close as possible, then in a powerful leap, throttle them with
their powerful jaws. Animals often wake up to find one of their own missing,
only to later see their remains yanked up a tree. The biggest leopards can kill
a one-ton eland, and pull up 300 lb wildebeest into their tree or cave.
Primates make good prey for them due to being helpless at night.

Worst of all, leopards are cosmopolitan, being found in all
continents (the European leopard and Jaguar were wiped out by the ice age) but
Australia and the Americas (the Americans have pumas and jaguars filling in
their niche).

For 6 million years
they’ve made short work of primates from Orroin and Paranthropus on the plains
of Africa to modern humans in rural Africa and India.Some leopards in history have become so
assured to be able to hunt humans they even attack during the day.One leopard in India, the Panar Leopard of
1910, killed and devoured over 400 people before thelegendary Anglo-Indian hunter/conservationist
Jim Corbettbrought him down.In the spring of 2015, at least 10 people
were killed by leopards across India. In turn, traditional medicine and the
growth of human populations in Africa and Asia have ravaged leopard populations
in turn.

You see, as human populations expand, they push into leopard
ranges. Worse, they destroy habitat for their herds. With sheep, goats, and
cattle replacing the native fauna, the versatile and cunning cats turn on the
domestic animals as prey, and sometimes find humans as side-courses. Even worse
are the man eaters, older, sicker cats, unable to tackle prey or confront other
leopards for territory, hunting people as easy prey and their main food source.

Lions and tigers, being larger but diurnal, do more damage
to humans but are in turn critically endangered due to their food and
territorial needs. Lions evolved in Africa about 1 million years ago, spread
into Eurasia and North America, then quickly became almost extinct over the
past 200,000 years of constant conflict with humans. Preindustrial societies
waged war with predator cats over territory and prey, and industrial cultures
hunt them for trophies and superstition to the point of extinction.

The genus Panthera, the endangered genus of big cats, was
not the first cat predator on apes, of course.About 10 million years ago the main predator in Eurasia, Africa, and
North America was Machairodus. Joined with its kin Amphimachairodus and
Miomachairodus, this tiger-sized giant (from 600 to 1,000 lbs) evolved long
serrated fangs for killing giant prey. It’s possible that these cats caused the
last of the creodonts, nimravids and bear dogs to go extinct.Machairodus was succeeded in the Pliocene by
the smaller (300 lb) sabertooth Megantereon, who covered the same territories
alongside the ungulate-specialist cousin Dinofeis

Megantereon was definitely an ape hunter. Large fangmarks
have been found on the bones of Australopithecus and Paranthropus, and even our
own genus was prey. A Homo erectus specimen from Georgia, D2280, was found with
deep, partially healed, probably mortal wounds on its forehead, wounds that
match the fangs of this cat. Isotopes taken from the teeth of Megantereon have
been analyzed, and it seems that the animal had the same range of prey as
leopards do today, including primates.No doubt countless unwary hominins have been taken as prey by this
sabertooth cat.

Interestingly enough, the fossil site of Zhoukoudien has
both remains of Homo erectus and Megantereon, some of the last fossils of
either species. One can imagine a dark night in northern China, these
prehistoric humans clutched at their wooden spears and huddled around their
cookfire,shivering at the howl of the
wolf, the cackle of the hyena, and the knowledge that somewhere in the dark, a
saber-tooth monster could grab them from behind and drag them into the
darkness, a darkness that lasted forever for the victim.

Zhokoudian was also a site for the most horrifying hyena of
all time. Hyenas evolved as the equivalent of dogs in the old world during the
Miocene, sophisticated pack hunters that could take a variety of different
prey. Spotted hyenas, the largest and most successful of the family, ranged into
Eurasia during the Pliocene and the Pleistocene, their bone-crushing bites
leaving their mark on hominin fossils through the ages.Today they are feared as grave-robbers and
the familiars and forms of witches in Africa, and horror stories are told of
the horrific civil wars of the 20th century providing bounties for
the hyenas. To make matters worse, spotted hyenas, unlike the smaller brown and
striped species, are incredible hunters, and like leopards hunt at night.
They’re not as audacious or cosmopolitan as leopards, so they have killed fewer
people, but hyena attacks have happened and do happen every couple of years.
Unlike leopards, they prefer ungulates and are more likely to take livestock,
but a century ago villages were reported as being terrorized by packs of
starving hyenas.

The Spotted Hyena is not the only man-eating hyena in
prehistory however. Until 300,000 years ago, the spotted species shared its
range across Africa and Eurasia with the giant hyena, Pachycrocuta. This animal
could grow the size of a lioness, weigh 300 lbs, and their lairs are filled
with the bones of their prey.If these
animals could bring down cattle and bison, they could bring down humans. You
see, its size made it a less efficient hunter than the spotted species, as the
latter was smaller and could support larger families and run faster. It’s been
speculated that the giant hyena was more of a scavenger, using its size to
dominate spotted hyenas, wolves, and leopards, even confronting sabertooth
cats. On one hand, the bite of the giant hyena is stronger at the molars than
canines, preventing a stronger killing bite, and some papers insist on an
exclusively scavenger lifestyle. On the other, the body is also more robust,
not just the molars-spotted hyenas have stronger bones than their scavenging
kin, which need to move quickly to grab prey. There is also the fact that its
eyes give it stereoscopic vision-if it was a scavenger, it was not that
efficient a scavenger, moving slower, specializing in large carcasses, and not
having the same breadth of vision of a vulture. Vultures and striped hyenas are
poor analogues for large terrestrial carnivores.At any rate, slower animals like humans would
be possible prey.

Sure enough, Zhokoudian contains not only human caves, but
hyena caves as well. Human skulls and long bones at the site have been found to
have been crushed. One suggestion is that other humans broke the bones for
cannibalism, but it’s just as equally possible that the bones were crushed by
the teeth of hyenas. Spotted hyenas have a bite force of over 1,000 lbs per
square inch, and the larger hyena would have a stronger bite. Finds in Georgia
and Spain show elephant carcasses fed on by these hyenas, suggesting that the
animal could at least pierce the bones of an elephant. Assuming the females
reach twice the size of spotted hyena females, and that bite force scales up by
size, that would mean hyena girls with 2,000 lb bites! Enough to pop a human
skull like an egg or snap a femur like a twig.

Finally, a universal object of awe in the northern
continents is the bear. Every year in North America, a person living in bear
country is killed by a bear. There are two reasons for bear attacks-one is by
females pretending their cubs that that human unknowingly (And sometimes knowingly)
approach, and the other is predation. Bears are omnivores, eating anything it
comes across-fruit, fish, roots, leaves, eggs, carrion, reptiles and whatever
mammals it can barrel down. Brown bears are the most successful species, having
adapted to a historical range from Morocco and Spain to Mexico. Smaller black
bears live in China and North America. In northern China, black bears and brown
bears neighbor pandas. In India, their range borders that of sloth bears and
sun bears. Around the arctic circle, they border Polar bears. And in South
America, they are not found but instead bears are of the Spectacled
species.In the Americas, two genera of
giant short faced bears ranged from Argentina to Alaska until the invasion of
humans.

Bear art adorns European human sites. Neanderthal sites
contain bear bones, and cave bear skulls were collected by Neanderthal people
in some areas, perhaps as a form of worship.Bears and humans, being voracious omnivores, often find themselves at
war through history. Bears have been hunted to extinction in many parts of the
range, such as North Africa and Mexico.Extinct Pleistocene bearslike
cave bears and short faced bears were likely hunted to extinction by their
human rivals. Polar bears, Spectacled bears, and Sun bears tend to avoid humans
due to their habitats, but black bears and brown bears and humans have hunted
each other for thousands of years.Black
bears and sloth bears kill people usually in aggressive counterattacks.The conflict between humans and bears is
ancient, but we don’t know who first preyed on who. By the time humans left
Africa, we were hunting small game. Did we kill cubs? Did the bears view us as
easy prey? The beginning of the conflict, unlike those of humans against big
cats, remains a mystery. Asian bears are nearly extinct thanks to human hunting
and habitat loss, but American bears are neighbors as Americans and Canadians
still live in woody areas where bears once ruled and venture to when other
foods are scarce.

I recommend the excellent book Man the Hunted by Donna Hart
for more on this topic. We’ll eventually talk about these individual species in
their own articles, but it says something how many of our fears- water, the
night, reptiles, etc, all date back to a time when we were prey.Human technology has made us the winner, and
our old enemies are almost destroyed by our hunger and greed, but our fears and
perceptions are prehistoric. We’ve evolved our cognition; it’s time we evolve
our psyche.

About Me

Hi everyone! You may know me already, but 99% of you won't. I've decided to make a blog for myself. I'm a anthropology student who has returned to his original passion for palaeontology. Ever since I was little, I've been fascinated with the weird and wonderful animals that have inhabited our planet and I've made this blog to keep this in my mind and hopefully in yours. Most people blog about their interests, and while I've got a range of interests-see history and anthropology above, not to mention zoology, astronomy, art, cooking, science fiction and fantasy films and literature, and a myriad of others, the one I want to do for a living is the study of Earth's ancient past.

On this blog I'll review papers, talk about fossils, museums, and taxa, review art, film, literature, and our culture's view of paleontology, and share memories and insights. I've been inspired by the far better blogs of professional palaeontologists, and I'll share them as time goes on. I'm also open to requests and questions of opinions, the latest palaeo news, and discussions with other fans informal and professional.

I think this is going to have fun, and I'm hoping my readers will have just as much fun.

Copyright: All media and print reviewed belongs to the owners and publishers. Likewise, all art used for this blog belongs to their artists. This is a non-profit blog for education and entertainment.